Working name of US writer, movie projectionist and graphic designer Thomas Earl Reamy (1935-1977); early involved in Fandom, he won a Hugo in 1967 and 1969 for his FanzineTrumpet, afterwards publishing Nickelodeon, and participating in Shayol. He began publishing with "Twilla" for TheMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September 1974 and, by late 1977 when he died of a heart attack, had become a writer of potential stature in the field, having just won the 1976 John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer (though in fact most of his work must be thought of as fantasy). The tales assembled in San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories (coll 1979) – the title novelette "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" (August 1975 F&SF) won a 1976 Nebula – were notable for the threatening sweetness of their probing of unconscious material, often sexual, though they often ended at a point of healing uplift, occasionally sentimentalized. In his novel Blind Voices (1978), which shared a common background with "Twilla" and "San Diego Lightfoot Sue", a small Kansas town around 1930 is visited by a travelling circus full of freaks and creatures of legend. The homage to Charles G Finney, Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury is clearly deliberate; a final explanation of the circus creatures in terms of Genetic Engineering provides no more than an sf pretext, the book reading as elegiac fantasy. [JC]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →